About hot spares Hot spares are set to a specific pool, but can be attached to any vdev of the pool automatically in case of failures. If you only have a single vdev consisting of all your disks, you are better off directly incorporating the disks (except if you already have RAIDZ3 and still disks … Read more
The short answer to this is, no. Unfortunately, you need the remote console capability to do this and that feature is only offered with the iDRAC Enterprise. You can only monitor your system (and perhaps do power control) with the Express version. You can, however, purchase the riser card from Dell to upgrade your Express … Read more
Designing the reliability of a disk array: Find the URE Rate of your drive (manufacturers don’t like to talk about their drives failing, so you might have to dig to find this. It should be 1/10^X where X is around 12-18 commonly). Decide what is an acceptable risk rate for your storage needs†. Typically this … Read more
I managed to get speeds very close to the numbers I was expecting. I was looking for 400MB/sec and managed 392MB/sec. So I say that is problem solved. With the later addition of a cache device, I managed 458MB/sec read (cached I believe). 1. This at first was achieved simply by increasing the ZFS dataset … Read more
The sideband cables are used to connect the controller to a managed backplane or disk enclosure, so that it can monitor the controller as well as the disks.
As far as I know, really the only option you have that approaches being somewhat reliable is to get a SAN that implements storage virtualization and connect your windows servers to it via iSCSI/FC/FCoE/etc. The SAN will be able to give you similar features as ZFS does: snapshots, dynamic volume sizing, cloning, etc.
It depends on what you are trying to do. While Raid 10 would give you faster reads and writes of the two, as you said, it is possible to lose everything if you lose the wrong two drives. But on larger disk arrays you could lose exactly half the drives and retain full operations. But … Read more
What exactly does it do? The excerpt from this Compaq document explains it well: Power interruptions, even for brief moments, result in the loss of data which was being written to or read from storage… Power interruptions can have terminal effects on data which is in the process of being written and is temporarily residing … Read more
Your disks are either 512e (512 sectors on SAS/SATA interface) or 4k native (4k sectors on SAS/SATA interface), and unfortunately there is no way to change that via software or jumpers etc. You select the transfer mode when you buy the disks. Buy 4k native disk if you have adapter that supports 4k native on … Read more
RAID-5 is a fault-tolerance solution, not a data-integrity solution. Remember that RAID stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. Disks are the atomic unit of redundancy — RAID doesn’t really care about data. You buy solutions that employ filesystems like WAFL or ZFS to address data redundancy and integrity. The RAID controller (hardware or software) … Read more